DNP 709 Module 4 Leader Self-Assessment Paper Example

Steady, Warm and Slow to Risk: A Self-Assessment of an Emerging Innovation Leader

Student Name

Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation, Arizona State University

DNP 709: Individual and Innovation Leadership in Healthcare Practice

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Steady, Warm and Slow to Risk: A Self-Assessment of an Emerging Innovation Leader

Emotional Intelligence

My emotional intelligence results were highest for empathy and relationship management and lowest for emotional self-control under time pressure. The pattern matches my experience: I read staff well, but on days with several admissions and a short schedule, my tone becomes clipped and I make decisions without explaining them. Reviews of nursing leadership have linked relational styles that depend on these skills to better staff satisfaction, retention and well-being (Cummings et al., 2018), which makes the low self-control score a real risk to the strength I rely on.

Behavioral Tendencies

The behavioral style inventory placed me in a steady, supportive style: patient, loyal, a good listener, uncomfortable with sudden change and conflict. My lowest dimension was the dominant, driving style. This explains why staff describe me as approachable and why I delay hard conversations.

Innovation Characteristics

Among the personas in Kelley and Littman (2016), my strongest faces are Caregiver and Hurdler and my weakest is Experimenter. I will work around obstacles to protect a good idea, but I rarely build quick, rough tests; I prefer to plan until a change feels safe.

Ethics

In the ethics reflection, I hold firm values on honesty and fairness, consistent with ethical leadership as personal conduct and its promotion through two-way communication and reinforcement (Brown et al., 2005). My weakness is enforcement: I tolerated a charge nurse's unfair assignments for months because confronting her felt disloyal.

What Others See

I asked two staff nurses and my director to describe my leadership in three words before I saw any results. The nurses chose "fair," "calm" and "available"; my director chose "trusted," "careful" and "slow." Their words match the tools closely, which makes the results harder to dismiss. The director's "slow" stung, but it lines up with the steady style and the weak Experimenter face, and it names the cost that my staff are too polite to mention. The match between outside views and self-report also matters for the development plan: if the people around me can see the pattern, they can also tell me when it changes.

Synthesis

The tools agree on a single pattern: I build trust well and spend it too carefully. Innovation needs both trust and the willingness to test, fail and confront.

The pattern has a clear consequence for innovation. Kelley and Littman (2016) describe innovation as the work of a team in which different faces take turns: someone learns, someone organizes, someone builds. A leader who only cares and clears hurdles can protect a promising idea for months without ever learning whether it works. On my unit, a nurse's idea for a discharge medication teaching card waited a whole quarter because I wanted it perfect before testing it. In that time, a two-week trial on five patients would have told us more than my planning did. The same caution affects ethics. When I delayed confronting the charge nurse, I told myself I was protecting the team, but the newer nurses who carried the heaviest assignments paid for my comfort. Ethical leadership, as Brown et al. (2005) describe it, includes making standards clear and holding people to them, not only modeling good conduct.

Development Plan

1. Self-control under pressure: a two-minute pause before staffing decisions on high-acuity days, and a weekly note on when my tone slipped.

2. Conflict: use a structured conversation model for one overdue conversation each month, starting with the charge nurse.

3. Experimentation: run one small test of change each month with a two-week time limit, accepting that some will fail.

I will ask two staff nurses to tell me at midterm whether they notice a difference.

Implications for My DNP Role

DNP-prepared leaders are expected to lead change across systems. My profile suggests I will be most effective paired with a teammate who drives pace, and most at risk when I mistake avoidance for kindness.

References

Brown, M. E., Treviño, L. K., & Harrison, D. A. (2005). Ethical leadership: A social learning perspective for construct development and testing. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 97(2), 117-134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2005.03.002

Cummings, G. G., Tate, K., Lee, S., Wong, C. A., Paananen, T., Micaroni, S. P., & Chatterjee, G. E. (2018). Leadership styles and outcome patterns for the nursing workforce and work environment: A systematic review. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 85, 19-60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2018.04.016

Kelley, T., & Littman, J. (2016). The ten faces of innovation: Strategies for heightening creativity. Profile Books.